Tansi Nîtôtemtik,
To close out our week on the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s Calls to Actions concerning education, we wish to take a step back and examine the societal and historical function of public education and its central role in understanding what reconciliation means. In doing so we wish to bring into question the compatibility between the imagined bounds of the current Canadian educational system and the very concept of reconciliation.
The Canadian state has long used education as an intentional colonial weapon. The state’s imposition of systematic violence against children under the guise of ‘education’ was a central tool in the commission of cultural genocide.[1] This was an open and stated purpose of education, with John A. MacDonald declaring the following before the House of Commons: “Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”[2] The deliberate use of education to colonize went to equally insidious colonial policies - facilitating land acquisition for settler development. [3]
As we have noted this week, the Federal Government retains constitutional authority over First-Nations and Inuit Education and continues to govern this authority under the same Indian Act, just 25 years after the last residential school closed.[4] In the face of this recent history, what understanding of reconciliation can be actualized under even the loftiest ambitions of our current educational system and legal framework?
Audrey Lorde - Courtesy of Silver Press
The term ‘reconciliation’ is a malleable and mutable concept. The word entered the Canadian Jurisprudence in the 1990 case of R v Sparrow,[5] a landmark decision which recognized that the Musqueam band held existing Aboriginal rights to fish which were protected under section 35 of the Constitution Act - a right that couldn’t be infringed ‘without justification.’[6] The concept of reconciliation presented in Sparrow reads quite narrowly – the act of ‘reconciliation’ in Sparrow wasn’t between the Crown and the Musqueam people but was centered on reconciling the Federal Government’s power over Musqueam people, with the Federal Government’s duty to Musqueam people.[7]
The legal use of ‘Reconciliation’ has evolved through the case law since Sparrow, and while the concept is still inconsistent it has adopted further meaning which seeks to reconcile the ‘pre-existence of Aboriginal peoples with the Crown’s assertion of sovereignty over Canadian territory.’[8] This meaning and understanding invokes mutuality, principles of self-governance, and a call to deeply examine both the historical realities and legal fictions that have structured our present society. [9] These understandings of what reconciliation means continue to be conflated in law and governance – a modern building on the half-completed foundation of the one that stood before.
This last week we gave out failing or poor grades to almost all Calls to Action on Education. In addition to the four calls to Action in Education which we covered, the remaining three [10] also receive failing grades, as they have received little or no attention from governing bodies:
- We call upon the federal government to develop with Aboriginal groups a joint strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians
- We call upon the federal government to prepare and publish annual reports comparing funding for the education of First Nations children on and off reserves, as well as educational and income attainments of Aboriginal peoples in Canada compared with non-aboriginal people.
- We call upon the federal government to provide adequate funding to end the backlog of First Nations students seeking a post-secondary education.
Notably, the Calls to Action on education focus on eliminating current gaps in funding and education within the system as it currently exists. There is no excuse for the current Federal government, which ran two elections campaigns on providing educational opportunities to Northern communities, [11] to have not met the low bar set by these Calls to Action. But what can a reimagined public and social education system provide that extends beyond the scope of maintaining a status quo?
To pose a hypothetical - if the government had acted responsibly and had miraculously earned A’s in all Calls to Action relating to education, which meaning of ‘reconciliation’ would it have aspired to: nation-to-nation mutuality or sovereign paternalism? Are the highest aspirations for Indigenous education bound by a ceiling in which First Nation, Inuit and Metis students are simply receiving a passable or comparable colonial education to non-Indigenous students? Can the same colonial legal and education systems that so recently sought to destroy the very humanity of Indiginous people be relied upon to provide just outcomes?
The ideas of contemporary thinkers such as Audre Lorde and Paulo Freire, who both provided a reimagined definition of ‘education,’ can help guide this conversation. Audre Lorde gave a speech in 1984 at Berkley which was directed at the exclusion of women of colour in academia. [12] In it, she posits: “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change [13]. Oppressive societal systems can’t be simply recalibrated to fix the harm they’ve done - they must be stripped down and reinvented.
In 1968 Paulo Freire published his seminal work, “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” within one year of Pierre Elliot Trudeau attempting to pass the White Paper. While Freire’s writing centered around his experiences teaching in his home country of Brazil, it foreshadowed the effect that the residential school system would have in Canada. Freire fiercely critiqued any educational system which was unilaterally imposed by those in power against those whom they oppress. Regardless of intent - these systems harm both the oppressor and the oppressed.[14] Freire presents education as an instrument – one which may either ‘facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system’ or ‘ become the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.’[15]
Photo: Paulo Granchi Sobrihno
“There's no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.” – Paulo Freire
Our position is that the Calls to Action on Education are but a starting point for the conversations that this country needs to undertake as it pertains to education and ‘reconciliation’. Education is more than curriculum – it is the vessel upon which we structure society and relate to each other. It can be an immensely powerful tool to get as close as we can to a functioning understanding of ‘reconciliation’.
This past week our team attended the Indigenous Bar Association’s Disrupted Systems conference. We will be featuring key panels and presenters from the October 9th session over the next several days.
Until tomorrow,
Team ReconciliAction YEG
1 Discussion around the prefix of ‘cultural’ is contentious. See generally: Daniel Shwartz, “Cultural Genocide Label for Residential Schools Has No Legal Implications, Experts Say” CBC (13 June 2015), online: <https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/cultural-genocide-label-for-residential-schools-has-no-legal-implications-expert-says-1.3110826>
2 House of Commons Debates (9 May 1883), 1107–1108.
3 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015) at 3.
4Indian Act, RSC 1985, c I-5, ss 114-117.
5 R v Sparrow, [1990] 1 SCR 1075.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Joshua Ben David Nichols, A Reconciliation Without Recollection? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020) at 41.
9 Ibid.
10 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015) at 147-150.
11 Liberal Party of Canada, “Forward a Real Plan for Success: Building a Better Future With Indigenous Peoples” online: <https://liberal.ca/our-platform/>
12 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Berkley, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 2007) at 110- 114.
13 Ibid.
14 Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, Herder and Herder, 1972)
15 Ibid.
